Tweeting and Posting

03 October 2012

I’ve been reading about all the changes at Twitter lately with a bit of sadness and also a bit of understanding. I can see the point of view of the company as they want to own the product and profit from it, but as a geek I also see the point of view of the developers and many others who have spent countless hours to make Twitter what it is. That being said, a while back I joined App.net. I really liked the idea of paying for the service and making that the way the service survives and breaks even. So I joined and I checked it out and I followed a few people, but really, it was a ghost town in there. There wasn’t much action and there certainly weren’t too many people posting. And to be honest, keeping up with two streams just was too much for me. I wasn’t finding much value in it, but was glad to support them as it was more about the principle of what they were trying to do.

Well, today that changed quite a bit. Tapbots, makers of many cool iOS Twitter clients, released NetBot, a client for App.net. It is a gorgeous, easy to use client and it makes checking the stream more interesting and I am already seeing a rise in the people posting on it because of the new client. There are ways to have posts go both places so I’ll probably be doing something like that in the near future and switch most of my posting to App.net. We’ll see how this goes and where App.net goes in the future, but I think, eventually, it could be better than Twitter because there won’t be any ads. It is another reminder that if you value an online service and it is free, then the service is really using you, or your data, to sell something else. Paying for something you value allows the service to be about users and not about advertisers.